Welcome to the year of death by nuance

A few weeks ago, when a town-hall questioner lobbed a softball question to Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, she answered in what many pundits now claim could be the death blow to her candidacy.

“What was the cause of the Civil War?” she was asked.

And rather than giving the answer that any ten-year-old American could give, she opted instead for nuance.

The Civil War was fought over “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do,” she said.

Of course, Haley was right in a technical sense, because embracing or abolishing slavery was all about “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do.” Like the freedom to place other human beings in shackles, to work them as beasts of burden, and to sell them as property. Or the freedom to throw off your chains, pick up your family, and try to find a better way to live.

Slavery. Of course.

Ask her what “Moby Dick” was about, and she might say “An exciting boat ride!” True, but it sort of skims over the whale in the room, right?

But despite being technically correct with her Civil War answer, for her to claim the war was over “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do” and not follow it with “specifically slavery,” that’s an exercise steeped in nuance. The kind of nuance that can kill a candidacy.

Because when it comes to nuance, the trouble often comes not by what you said, but by how you said it. Or why you chose to leave something unsaid.

In Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address, deep into the Civil War, he honored fallen Union soldiers for their sacrifice in the “great task” of bringing the nation to a “new birth of freedom” — without ever saying the word “slavery.”

Did he forget what all the fuss was about? Or was he purposely making his speech nuanced? And if so, to what end?

At only 272 words, he expressed hope that this sundered “new nation” would be made whole again. It is worth noting that the seceded states he wished to bring back into the fold were states that still operated under constitutions that embraced slavery. In other words, reunification was the first and foremost goal above all other goals that would be sorted out later.

And so, was that the reason for not saying the word “slavery” at Gettysburg, where more than 7,000 soldiers died, almost evenly split between Union and Confederate troops? Did he want to honor the Union dead in a nuanced way without “poking the bear” that killed them?

It’s too late to ask Lincoln about his nuance, and Nikki Haley’s clean-up over her nuance dust-up offers few clear clues for her word choice. If anything, her clumsy next-day response seemed like yet another bear-poke that didn’t satisfy anyone.

We’ll learn what price she will pay for it all by the end of this year — the year of death by nuance.

Similarly, presidents at three Ivy League schools laced up their nuance-dance shoes for congressional lawmakers when they were asked whether students advocating genocide in the Israel-Palestine conflict had violated school policies.

The presidents answered—accurately—that the First Amendment and the Supreme Court have ruled that free speech includes the right to advocate horrible, objectionable, lawless behavior, but it does not allow speech inciting it. Other Supreme Court decisions have ruled that those free speech rights extend to students as well as to other citizens.

As with Nikki Haley, they were right, of course. But framing a response about the distinction between “advocating” and “inciting” genocide is the kind of nuance that gets people in trouble these days.

The university presidents may have been better off saying: “The crap that these pampered, privileged Ivy League punks are spouting is abhorrent, and if any of it transfers into action, they will learn quickly enough what this college will and will not permit. But hey, for now our hands are tied. Besides, if we kick these twerps out of America’s finest universities for their claptrap, where can we send them to learn how to pull their heads out of their butts?”

But Ivy League presidents don’t talk like that, which is why I didn’t go to Harvard. (Well, there were other reasons, but for now, forgive my nuance.)

But even if the university presidents gave an answer like that at their congressional grilling, it might not have been enough to satisfy anyone.

Because this is 2024, the year of death by nuance, where nothing but full-throated braying of popular opinion will do.

Yee haw!

Happy New Year!

It’s gonna be a lively ride.

TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com.

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